2008-09-28 It's a Mystery to me...

...why Blyton allows her heroes to treat poor Ern so savagely in this book. In other Blyton books I have read, those who get treated horridly by the protagonists have usually displayed the kind of behaviour that leads children to think that they got what they had coming to them. Here, the victim of this psychological bullying is poor Ern, whose only crime seems to be that he is not from the same social class as the other children and he talks with a working class accent. This is the most open example of Blyton's snobbishness I have ever read. Until this book, I had always thought the PC lobby were overreacting to EB; not here. My daughter picked up on it immediately (and the use of "Fatty" as an "unkind" nickname for the hero).

Of course, in the current version, the editors may have toned down these class-based aspects of the book (though I fail to see how they'd manage, since the plot revolves around them entirely. Perhaps they have even renamed Fatty...). The copy I read was a second-hand one published in the sixties which I bought for my daughter (9) who has devoured all of the "Five" series and some of the "Secret 7" books. This was the first of the "Mystery" series we have read and it has not given me much desire to read any of the others.